Bindings for Sale

Bound in mustard and black goatskin with multi-coloured, sanded onlays. Painted top edge gilt. Gold tooling. Clamshell box with onlays and black tooling.

This is a beautiful little book of poems which take as its theme the body. The illustrations by Coriander Reisbord were inspired by microscope slides. I have echoed these in the inlays on the cover. This is a Millimetre binding, a simplified fine binding originating in Denmark, which is suitable for small or slim books.

Bound in mustard goatskin with coloured onlays, leather doublures and suede flyleaves. Top edge gilt. Gold tooling.

Barnfield was a ‘gentleman at court’, an admirer and possible rival of Shakespeare. He was the only other male poet of his age other than Shakespeare to write love poems directed at a male muse, in this case the mysterious figure ‘Ganymede’. My inspiration for the design, both the two figures on the cover and the letterforms on the inside, comes from Sonnet XI, (pictured) especially the punch delivered by the last two lines, which when I read them, knocked the breath out of me:

He open'd it: and taking of the cover,

He straight perceav'd himselfe to be my Lover.

So the tooling on the doublures is in reverse but the words are offset on the suede where they become legible but faint, which seemed to me to be a perfect solution for expressing the metaphor of the mirror, which reveals the secret love. Writing of this binding, Hicks-Jenkins has said:

I’ve always enjoyed the point at which the work of one artist, writer or composer finishes, and a second picks up the baton…I think that Dominic’s binding for The Sonnets of Richard Barnfield is a spellbinding thing. Everything about is ‘right’, and I congratulate him on the achievement. That suede flyleaf is fantastic!

The binding was made for Designer Bookbinders international exhibition Inside Out in 2015

Covered in brown goatskin, top edge painted, leather joints and doublures, suede flyleaf. Gold tooled inlays with painted borders. Gold tooled dotted lines. Inside blind tooled. Additional vellum inlays. Title tooled blind on spine. Clamshell box.

This is very handsome book from Simon Lawrence of the Fleece Press, one of our finest printers of the last fifity years. The floral inlays are inspired by William Morris. They suggest a garden path, and the dotted lines the walkways between them.

The binding was made for Designer Bookbinders international competition, 2022.

Bound in blue goatskin with inlays of various shades of brown. Gold tooling. Light brown goatskin doublures, blind tooled, and suede flyleaves. Top edge gilt.

This is an old story from the thirteenth century about Thomas of Erceldoune, who was a real person who lived in Roxburghshire. He falls in love with the Queen of the Fairies and begins an adventure to an otherworld. He relates the poem which has been retold in various ballad forms since the fifteenth century. It is a fantastical tale of love and mystery, covering a twelve-month span.

The design, whilst more decorative that figurative, has twelve shapes for the twelve months, each containing lines which hint at the lines of the ballad. They are playfully interlinked as the story is, and the shapes are repeated on the doublures and flyleaves, suggesting the way the ballad has come down to us in various forms over the centuries.

Concertina structure with cut-out montage theatre panels. Hand coloured plates, cut-out windows in concertina walls throw light onto panels, base and lid enclose structure, and opaque panels in lid bring light from above. The whole book folds up (panels, base and lid) into a protective box, held closed with hidden magnets, and titled with a paper label.

Inspired by the theatrical peep-shows which were popular throughout Europe in the eighteenth century, the magic of the tunnel book is that it contains a hidden world which can only be seen by peeping through a small window. With the use of perspective and scale, a life in miniature is recreated.

This tunnel book recreates the world of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century bookbindery, during a period of mechanisation and the coming of the factory which changed it forever. In the foreground we see a seated lady sewing on the frame. In the next scene a finisher is tooling a line on a leather binding. Further on a man backs a book while a gentleman owner talks to the foreman about the progress of the work. Look beyond them and two men struggle with a strange new machine while across the way another lady is operating the steam-powered folding machine. Another man further on crushes that days' work in a giant standing press. In the back, in the only room with a nice warm fire, the clerks busy themselves with the important work of the business - the orders and accounts. The walls are hung with tools and everywhere you can see the cogs and flywheels that power the new machines which are taking over this once quiet workshop.

Made in a special limited edition of 25 copies.

Bound in dark brown goatskin, with matching joints and doublures. Painted head and tail edges. Inlays of sanded and gold tooled leather, painted around the edges. Title ‘White Voices’ tooled in gold across the front and back covers, and in reverse on the doublures. Housed in a suede-lined protective box, and a cloth-covered slipcase. 

This book tells the haunting symbolist tale of the Children’s Crusade in the thirteenth century. As the children wandered throughout Europe, they would be asked where they were going and the purpose of their quest and they replied ‘to Jerusalem to take back the Holy Land’. It is not certain that any of them made it.

The shapes of the inlays are a response to very bold woodcut illustrations, and suggest bodies moving across the landscape. 

The binding was made for Designer Bookbinders international competition, 2017.

Bound in the Tudor style, in orange Hewitt’s goatskin with purple and blue Harmatan goatskin onlays, leather doublures and suede flyleaves. Top edge painted. Gold tooling. 

This is an extraordinary book from Pat Randle, one the finest printers working today. It celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Society of Wood Engravers. Twenty contemporary artists were asked to create an engraving inspired by a historical artist, and here they are in this most handsome collection. The book is being hailed as one of the greatest Private Press books of the age. It has sold out, with this binding of mine being one of the last available.

The binding is the Tudor style — put simply, covering a book in overlapping strips of leather — invented by my first teacher Paul Delrue. Paul died in early 2024 and this binding is a tribute to him. I love bright colours on a binding, and lots of gold. The binding is very simple visually: the twenty gold circles represent the twenty old and twenty new artists, interlinked as they have been through history.